Is Banning Telecommuting Good for Parents?

The new Yahoo CEO, Marissa Meyer, in a bold move, has decided to ban telecommuting at the company. This is either a great decision or the worst idea in history, depending on who you talk to.

A recent article in the Washington Post discussed barriers to moms returning to the workforce. The Atlantic wrote a famous article about why women don’t make it to the top. Are changes like this likely to attract more women into the workplace or send more women running for jobs that are more flexible, even if they involve less pay? Many companies are talking about the lost brainpower of women who have left the workforce. Do moves like this help encourage women to stay in jobs or seek them?

The concern with “no telecommuting” is that it immediately places a restriction on flexibility, the most important factor for many primary caretakers of a small child. The free food and massages and other Google-type amenities are attractive, but if you have little kids, they hardly outweigh the need for flexibility.

Telecommuting, at least part of the time, makes it much easier for many moms to stay in the workplace. The reality is that in many cases, the primary childcare responsibilities fall on the mother. Many women are a fan of telecommuting, even if it is only occasional, because it makes it easier for them to blend their work responsibilities and home responsibilities.

How, in real-life, is a parent of small kids supposed to stay on-site, every day, for each workday without answering some fundamental questions:

What if I have to leave to get my kid because he is sick? Even if I work at the rest of the day to catch up, will that really count as work to my boss?

What if I need a flexible schedule to drop kids off and pick them up? Is an office that’s cutting telecommuting going to allow this kind of flexibility?

There is a lot of talk about collaboration. Are meetings going to be scheduled at a time that makes it difficult for me due to daycare pickup or other child responsibilities?

Does the lack of telecommuting mean that I am going to have to pay for more daycare to account for my commuting time? Often, daycares enact strict fees for parents that are late. Commuting time is a reality. What happens if your boss steps into your office at the last minute and you can’t leave for another 15 minutes? This could easily result in a $20 or higher late fee from a daycare.

The change from flexible to less flexible doesn’t bode well in my opinion. What do you think?

Christa T. Palmer is a mother of 2 small children who lives in Colorado. She worked in the corporate world for more than a decade, but she was laid off the day after returning from maternity leave. Since then, she has worked as a freelance writer.

I'm struggling to see the upside of banning telecommuting. I don't see what efficiency gains Meyer expects to see, unless she's going to force everyone to, I dunno, hack Google's algorithm and thus return her company to something approaching relevance.

Yahoo! should die a terrible, terrible death, if only to rid the Internet of the scourge of Yahoo! News comment sections.

Dear Steve DIAF. That kind of screed is precisely the kind of shit I expect from people who have never had to make a choice between food and heat bills. It's nice that you're doing OK but 99% of this country is struggling to pay bills and make ends meet. Not only that but Yahoo is supposedly a, wait for it – TECHNOLOGY company. If they can't find a way to make telecommuting work they are screwed and deserve to go under.

I have no beef with getting work done. I think an employer should expect productivity. All I'm saying is what you said – there is more than one way to collaborate like you said. What about going into the office occasionally? What about a blend of telecommuting and being in the office. Why does she have to go straight to a completely inflexible option?

Here's the fun part of this equation – if a company is going to say there's no more telecommuting, that means that no work happens outside the office. Everybody has to go into the office in order to do their jobs.

The follow-on from this statement is that there is no more checking email in the evenings from home, no more 9 pm calls to discuss strategy for an hour and a half in advance of tomorrow's 8 am conference call. Work stays at work.

And, if weather prevents someone from getting to the office, well, then it's a weather day or a sick day or a vacation day. They can't get to the office, so they can't work. It's that simple.

Also, gone are the days of lugging a laptop everywhere. No more carrying that office tether on vacation, or to a friend's house, or anywhere else one might be expected to have downtime. If work can only occur in the office, then there's no reason to remove one's computer from the office, now is there?

Same goes for office email access on one's smartphone – there's no need to be reachable by office email outside the office anymore. if someone from work needs to reach you, they can call you, and you can decide whether or not to pick up. If you do decide to answer, say, on a weekend, what if you're 500 miles away from the office? You just have to say you're "out of pocket" and can't get to the office that day.

TurdHurdlerFebruary 26, 2013 at 1:42 pm

She's trying to turn the clock back to 1990, or something. Go, progress!

Most of the conversation I see about this is centered around how this will affect families with young children who would need daycare. I can't help but look back on my own adolescence and wonder the effects it might have had on my life if the technology had existed for my single-parent mother with no support network to be able to telecommute (her job was very conducive to it). What if my mother had been able to be there to help me with my homework instead of me coming home and having no one, so instead I just skipped it. What if my mother had been able to be there to make sure I wasn't inviting my friends over so we could get drunk and high because I was the house without a parent home.

Maybe I'd have ended up going to college and having a profession where I could telecommute, having a positive financial impact on my family. Instead I went to a trade school and decided to be a stay-at-home mom because the profession I'm trained in doesn't enable me to make enough money to justify me working outside the home and paying for my children to have after-school supervision.

So, now I've been out of the workforce for years, with my husband being the sole earner. If something were to happen to him or our marriage, my earning potential is severely diminished because of my years out of the workforce.